08 January 2010 10:20 AM

The Spaniard with a plan, God help us all

Spain is the first country to hold the rotating presidency of the European Council since the Lisbon Treaty came into force on January 1st and downgraded the post. Now that the treaty has made the Belgian Herman Van Rompuy into a permanent president of the Council, the Spaniards and their prime minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero are trying to figure out how to big-up their six months playing second castanet to the Belgian.

So what we are stuck with from now until the end of June is a Spanish socialist politician with not enough work to do, trying to figure out how to look more important at meetings of the 27 member states. You might think that being the head of a government that has let near-20 percent of its national workforce become unemployed would keep Zapatero humble enough to stay away from 'big ideas' just now, but no chance.

However, his first 'big idea' is useful -- though only as an insight into the euro-mind and as a warning about yet more growth in EU power.

Here is what's up. Brussels now intends to launch a 10-year plan in March -- those of you over 45 will recognise this as being in the style of the old USSR five-year plans -- to improve the EU's competitiveness. Those of you who were around in Brussels in 2000 will realise the EU is already coming to the end of its first 10-year plan, something called the Lisbon Strategy, launched to make the EU 'the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world' by 2010.

The 'strategy' didn't work. Obviously.

So yesterday Zapatero said the EU should therefore apply 'corrective measures' against member states which fail to meet (what Brussels decides are) their obligations under this new 10-year plan. Under the Spaniard's plan, the 'corrective measures' will be enforced through new powers to be granted to the Commission.

The point being that it is only Day 8 of the new EU under the Lisbon Treaty -- the treaty that was supposed to set up a new framework for running the European institutions -- and calls are already being made that the Commission must be granted new powers, in addition to all the new powers the Lisbon Treaty already hands to the eurocrats.

This is yet another example of how the EU works by 'permanent revolution.' No agreement is ever final, nothing is ever settled -- no national power is ever safe. All that is ever final is the relentless push towards 'ever-closer union,' more precisely described as ever-more centralised European government.

In the case of these new euro-powers of 'corrective action,' what Zapatero is actually suggesting is that Commission officials would have the power to invade the budgets proposed by the governments and parliaments of member states and 'police' them if the budgets do not, in the opinion of the eurocrats, advance the EU's goals for greater competitiveness.

All of which makes David Cameron's posturing about taking back some of the increased powers that the Lisbon Treaty grants to Brussels more absurd. He has already surrendered any moral authority -- and political leverage -- that could get the United Kingdom out of the new constitutional treaty. Now Brussels is ready to mock his impotence by giving even more powers to the European institutions.

NOTE on 12 January: Just four days after Zapatero produced this 'big idea,' Germany and Britain have apparently killed it. The problem is, of course, that ideas for 'more Europe' never actually die. They just lie still for a while, until someone at the Commission reckons it is politically safe to breathe life into them again. This story isn't over yet.

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MARY ELLEN SYNON

Mary Ellen Synon is based in Brussels as a columnist at the Irish Daily Mail and contributor to the Mail on Sunday.

At other times she has worked as: a columnist at the Irish Sunday Independent and the Sunday Business Post, Ireland correspondent and later Europe correspondent at the Economist, an associate producer at CBS News 60 Minutes based in London, and a reporter for the Daily Telegraph.

Early in her career she was awarded a travelling fellowship by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust to allow her to study the Common Market.